What's the meta?

Zen 2011 U.K. BBC Masterpiece Theatre (three 90-minute episodes: Vendetta, Cabal, and Ratking). Directed by John Alexander (Vendetta), Christopher Menaul (Cabal), and Jon Jones (Ratking); screenplays by Simon Burke, based on Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen mystery novels.

The ‘meta’ here is doughty middle class Brits playing the Edward Gibbon-flavored noble and ignoble Romans they learned about reading classical authors, in a miniseries of modern-day police thrillers set in Rome. 

Aurelio Zen (Rufus Sewell)—his surname is Venetian, he reminds people, not a New Age confection—is a homicide detective and a ‘good cop,’ the son of a policeman killed in the line of duty when he was seven years old. He is separated from his wife and lives with his mother (the former pop singer Catherine Spaak). Not to worry, though: Zen’s love interest is a new secretary at work, Tania Moretti (Caterina Murino), whom everyone in the section would like to bed.

Zen is the center of the action because he is recognized as a straight shooter in a world in which most self-respecting people give every appearance of operating as players with something up his sleeve or down her cleavage. Picture Daniel Craig’s James Bond in the midst of I, Claudius or the BBC/HBO series Rome, in finely tailored Italian suits.

It works like a charm, and Sewell is ideal in the role.

Each episode involves a murder that quickly involves political implications in which a certain ministry (presumably the interior ministry, because it exercises control over police personnel and the agency budget) takes a special interest.

The unnamed Minister (Eduardo Guerchini, played by Anthony Higgins, according to imdb.com), through his aide, Amadeo Colonna (Ben Miles, in a Robert Vaughn-like role), summons Zen to the ministry to receive his missions impossible. Colonna closely monitors Zen’s progress as each case proceeds. Due to the extremely ‘sensitive’ nature of his assignments, not to mention the often questionable legality of obtaining the desired result, Zen, sensibly wary of his associates, generally works alone, intuitively, through his street contacts, informants and former cops.

The episodes, based on Michael Dibden’s complexly plotted novels, move quickly and efficiently. A farrago of sexy circumstantial information involving money, sex, politics, and celebrity gets chopped in a blender, as in Raymond Chandler’s classic The Big Sleep. Little is what it seems to be. The solutions come out in the wash. 

Vendetta—a business executive and two prostitutes are slain at his Abruzzi villa; his business partner who fled the scene is the prime suspect. The partner confesses, but there are too many loose ends and prying eyes to make the case go away quietly. Another man wrongly convicted of murder, released from prison with a terminal illness, seeks to even scores with those whom he holds responsible for his conviction, including Zen.

Cabal—the gay black sheep of an aristocratic Roman family takes a nosedive off a bridge. Is it suicide or murder? If murder, was the motive personal or a move to prevent exposure of an Opus Dei-like cabal of the well-connected? An ambitious female prosecutor senses old-boy blood in the water. Zen’s office romance with Moretti blooms as he works this case, but her estranged husband is opposing the divorce she seeks.

Ratking—an enormously wealthy industrialist and political contributor with a playboy son and an unstable daughter married to an ambitious parvenu, is kidnapped and held for five million Euro ransom. His lawyer is murdered and the ransom stolen en route to the kidnappers, who demand another five million Euros. Meanwhile, Zen must deal with a new chief who is a stickler for the book and resents his ‘special relationship’ with the Minister.

There are many moving parts to each story, lovely details and great camera shots, and good individual performances from a variety of British character actors within an entirely Italian milieu, from Miles’ Colonna to Stanley Townsend as Zen’s dyspeptic chief Moscati.  

The haunting series theme music helps to set the atmosphere of threat veiled behind the bright surfaces of this famously beautiful city, giving the work the feel of a throwback to crime and espionage stories of cold war era television.